My Gourmet Mushroom Farm

How I went from being a computer engineer to starting and owning a gourmet mushroom farm.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

How to grow Oyster Mushrooms?

I am thinking of posting some tips and tricks of what I've learned about growing oyster mushrooms on this blog!

Here a few things you should be aware of:

Things (not) to do in your growroom:

Be clean and healthy! This is very important. Be clean when you work with your spawn and whenever you enter your grow rooms. An entire crop in your grow room can be wiped out by a single fly!

You are risking your mushroom crop when you walk into your grow room with a cold!

Make sure you have cleaned the soles of your shoes when entering your grow room!

Never use any chemicals in your room while you have mushrooms growing there!You will loose your mushroom crop!

Never allow any visitors in your grow rooms without making sure that they are clean! (You can even go and take a shower with them just to make sure! - I have done this but that's a story for another day and another blog...)

Make sure the temp. inside your room is constant.

Make sure you keep a high level of humidity in your room.

Make sure you are wearing a mask when spawning your growing substrate.(I'll post more about sterilizing and spawing your growing substrate in a later post.)

Sunday, July 22, 2007

My IT Experience (2)

As I said in my previous post: “I was working with Idiots”

Another problem I had was the fact that I was working with complete idiots!

The CEO’s secretary just could not understand how to save a doc onto her stiffy drive. (Yes they are still using stiffy drives…) It was part of my responsibilities to run up to her office every time she had to save a doc onto her A: JUST UNBELIEVABLE!

The company secretary, an old man of almost 70, had no idea what an email is. He had never used the internet at all! Al his email were routed to my email address and it was part of my daily routine to print his emails and give it to him. He would then respond to it on paper and them I had to reply to his emails!

Hahaaa, a network engineer having to be the company’s secretary, secretary! That’s scary if you knew that I was working for a bank’s head office!

I had no job satisfaction at all! There were no IT training at that place because senior management believed it was totally unnecessary to upgrade any computer equipment! They told me that there were no plans to for new technology, meaning that there was no need for any further IT training.

I made use of the internet to get further online IT education especially computer network training. Thinking back now, with all my current problems, I definitely don’t want to go back there.

I enjoy growing my oyster mushrooms much more than working with idiots.

Sunday, July 1, 2007

My IT Experience

I was working in IT for about 12 years. I started as a mainframe operator and ended up as a network engineer and part time programmer. I even spent some time as a lecturer for a computer college.

The last company I worked for believed in buying and using cheap computers. These cheap pc’s were very unreliable. They were not Dell, Compact, IBM or any other name brand computers.In fact, they were all no-name pc’s built by some college students. They used cheap computer components to assemble these machines.

The other thing was that I got tired of the same network problems every day. This was due to the fact that they were using old 2nd hand network equipment. The hubs and routers were about 10 – 12 years old.

And I was working with idiots.

One day I decided that enough is enough and resigned to start my mushroom farm.